8:68) Hope O'Keeffe 19-JAN-98 13:39

Chicken boiling for soup on the stove; sourdough rising in the oven. The baby is sleeping; he's good for another hour or so. I look around at the little-kid clutter of four days in a stir-crazy row at home, nursing the boys through viral bronchitis. (Listening in the night for the wheezing, and the coughs, so deep for such tiny bodies, and the steroids, and antibiotics, and that horrible breathing machine again, their small faces pressed behind a green plastic mask. The vapor creeps out the ventilation holes: look, Mom, I'm breathing smoke like a dragon!) I sip at my coffee and contemplate taking down the Christmas decorations. When is it, exactly, that I turned into my mother?